Seth Cropsey
WSJ, June 16, 2025
“Absent proxies, nuclear potential and a missile arsenal, Iran would lose its leverage over the Gulf states and its coercive potential against Israel and in the Levant.”
The U.S. faces a consequential choice: take advantage of Israel’s audacious attacks on Iran to shepherd a new Middle East into existence, or allow this transformational strategic opportunity to pass. By giving Israel the time it needs to destroy Iranian military capacity, Washington can seize a strategic advantage in Europe and Asia.
Operation Rising Lion is a prime example of Israeli strategic culture. Israel doesn’t adapt well to fluid situations, in which it must react on the fly. The Oct. 7, 2023, attacks are a case in point: The Jewish state was frozen for much of the attacks, with individual heroism, not strategic response capacity, driving back Hamas. But when Israel has the time and capacity to plan an operation down to the smallest detail, the results are spectacular, whether the pager/walkie-talkie attack that crippled Hezbollah’s leadership, the September 2024 commando raid against an Iranian missile facility in northwestern Syria, the 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear site, or the 1981 strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
Rising Lion is on a completely different scale from those earlier operations. Israel sequenced its opening moves, simultaneously disabling Iran’s remaining air defenses and radars, killing high-ranking Iranian military leaders, and hitting Iranian missile silos. Subsequent strike waves began against nuclear and conventional military targets. Israel has crippled Iran’s command structures, dented its missile arsenal and substantially damaged its nuclear weapons program, hitting key sites in Isfahan, Arak, Natanz and Parchin. Israel also killed several Iranian nuclear scientists and leaders involved with the nuclear program, extinguishing crucial institutional and bureaucratic knowledge and creating more hurdles between enrichment and weaponization. If Rising Lion ended tonight, Israel would have set back Iran’s nuclear program by one to three years. …SOURCE